p. 5Place of Home in the Divine Plan of Creation

Has it ever seemed to you, dear reader, that when the good God was taking back from man the forfeited gift of human happiness, He left a remnant of it clinging to our homes, to brighten our firesides and make them pleasant and attractive to us? I myself have often thought so: for it has been my good fortune, during a varied life, to be brought into contact with many a happy family circle; and I have found in each that peace and love, and that simple, unaffected piety and holiness that must have been characteristics of the home of Eden before the fall of man. Our heavenly Father knew the dangerous allurements the world would have for the young and innocent: He knew the mazes of sin into which they would be led, in quest of a happiness with which they would at first associate no idea of evil: He knew the wasted affections, the dried-up, withered hearts, the loss of faith and hope in all that is good and holy, the premature decay, that would be the consequence of this vain pursuit: and knowing all this, He provided an antidote for it, by filling and surrounding our homes with a bright halo of happiness, more pure and holy and lasting than the world can ever offer. Heaven alone knows the number of young souls that have been saved from ruin by the influence or the remembrance of a happy home. Strong passions have been subdued by it; violent temptations have been driven to flight by it; children who had turned their faces and steps downwards and had been rushing with ever quickening pace to the depths of misery and shame, have been stopped in their course by it and led back and moulded into useful, respectable members of society. Parents also have found in home, in the love of wife and children, in the bright, comfortable, cheerful fireside, in the prattle of the little ones and their innocent joys, a powerful help to avoid the allurements of drink and gambling and other social vices. And yet, how careless men seem about this domestic happiness! how lightly and thoughtlessly it is often driven away, never again to return! Parents in particular, to whose keeping it is specially intrusted, seem not to know its value or the blessings it confers. A slight misunderstanding between husband and wife or a trivial fault or mistake of either of them often leads to angry words. These lead to others more excited and violent. Fierce passions are thus enkindled on both sides; accusation leads to accusation; the ashes of the past are raked up and thrown in each other’s face; and the end, in many cases, is that never-forgotten blow that leaves its mark indelibly on the heart of the wife, however soon its traces may fade from her cheek.

Now see the consequences of this breach to the children who witness it in tears and anguish of heart. The charm of home is broken for them. They are estranged from their father whom they consider cruel and unjust; they have no longer that loving confidence in him which they had before; his return home in the evening is not looked for with joy as it used to be; his presence among them is like the presence of a stranger; and they breathe more freely when he rises to go away. This estrangement between father and child generally tempts both to look outside the circle of home for that social happiness which they no longer find within it. The theatre, the club, the public-house, these and other resorts supply a welcome refuge from the cheerless fireside; and to one who looks beneath the surface of society it can scarcely be surprising that they are so largely frequented.

The happiness then that divine Providence has given to be the angel guardian of the family, ought to be carefully watched over by husband and wife and child. It is easily scared away; and when once gone, it is indeed hard to win it back.

But even when the brightness and happiness of our homes is gone, our hearts cling to them still with a bravely patient tenacity. Here again the hand of God is distinctly visible, giving to our nature that home-bias or instinct that keeps the members of the family together, in sickness and poverty, in troubles and disappointments, in jealousies and dissensions. I have met on my mission in London instances of this attachment, more heroic in their constancy and quiet endurance than many of the deeds recorded in history for the admiration of the world. I have known a father, himself a member of the Total Abstinence League of the Cross, to support for years a drunken wife and a fallen daughter, and to receive from both in return only abuse of the vilest kind. Yet every evening, he turned his steps to that wretched home of his, and put aside with quiet determination the many thoughts of desertion or revenge, or the still unholier thought of self-destruction which his unhappy position suggested. Cases of woman’s heroism under similar circumstances are too commonly known to need here any record of mine. Well, the secret of all such noble self-sacrifice may be traced to its foundation in the instinctive love of home, which the Hand of our Creator has stamped on every human heart. Blessed for ever be His loving care of us! He has not intrusted our fulfilment of home duties solely to the revealed expression of His divine Will, He has Himself moulded us in such a form, that the observance of those duties, so essential to the welfare and happiness, if not to the very existence of our race, is felt to be one of the purest pleasures, as well as one of the highest distinctions of our nature. It satisfies a craving and fills a void in the soul that the fulfilment of no other duty can accomplish.

If then, we had no revelation regarding the home and the family, the instinct that binds us to them would sufficiently prove their divine institution.

But Sacred Scripture, so far from being silent regarding the divine institution of home, alludes to it frequently in clear and emphatic words. I shall cite here only one passage, recorded in the second chapter of Genesis: “It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a help like unto himself.”—(Gen. ii. 18.) These significant words, spoken by our Creator Himself, evidently point to a moral want in man for society; and they show that the society by which that want is to be filled up, is the society of home, the society of husband with wife, and of husband and wife with their children. The word, “help,” implying co-operation and mutual dependence, expresses the formal idea of home. Husband and wife were created to cleave to each other, and were made two in one flesh, in order that they might supply each the other’s wants; that the woman’s gentleness might be entwined round the man’s strength, while her enduring love would encourage him in the battle of life, and repay him fully for his fidelity and protection. They were thus intended to form a complete society in themselves, the work of each blending and harmonizing with that of the other, influenced by the same spirit, directed to the same purpose, and co-operating in the attainment of the one common end.

To this society of husband and wife, a sublime mission in the two-fold order of nature and grace was given by its divine Founder. Young human lives were to be committed to its keeping, and to be left absolutely dependent on its gentle, fostering care. Not only were their bodies to be fed, and sheltered, and clothed by it; but their souls were to be hedged round by it with every safeguard of innocence, and to be trained in all holiness and virtue, until with fully matured, physical and spiritual natures, they would be able to go out into the world, and take their stand wherever God appointed them.

This divine mission of husband and wife has in it a dignity and a grandeur that cannot be too deeply impressed on them. They have an immense, mysterious power entrusted to them to prepare human souls for heaven, or to let them drift, and even give them a strong downward impulse, to eternal destruction. Their constant intimate intercourse with their children, as well as the instinctive tendency of the latter to shape their characters and lives after the model set by them, increases this power very much. We may teach a child at Sunday-school all that a child should know, but the influence of a father’s or mother’s daily life is in one respect superior to all our teaching. It can root up and destroy during the week the seedlings of virtue and of religious ideas that we, only on one day out of the seven, and then, only for an hour or two, have the opportunity of sowing in that young child’s soul. It can, on the other hand, by seconding our teaching, and by supplementing it, become the most powerful auxiliary means the Church possesses for the proper training and education of the young. When parents will have become convinced of these truths, Christianity will have little to fear from the efforts of infidel educationists to root it from the hearts of the people. Misrepresentations and sophisms that pass now for sound reasoning will then be swept aside like so many spider-webs; parental control will reassert itself in the home; and the Church will be reinstated in its rightful place over the school.

I have now given you, dear reader, an idea of the place that the home has been intended to hold in the divine plan of creation. It may be allowed me, however, before I pass on to the subject of the next chapter, to say a few words in reply to a very trite objection brought against the discipline of our Church on the nature of home ties. It is urged that the celibacy of our priesthood and of our religious communities is opposed to the natural instincts given to us by our Creator; that it is subversive of the family life of which I have been speaking; that it is a direct violation of the divine command: “increase and multiply,” given to man in the beginning; and, in fine, that it is the cause or occasion of much immorality and scandal.

Some Catholics find a difficulty in understanding how objections like these can be made seriously. They are so accustomed to consider, as the highest form of human life, the entire consecration of oneself to God, implied in a vow of chastity, that they expect everyone to have the same settled ideas on the subject as they have themselves. Yet, I believe many Protestants to be thoroughly in earnest in urging these antiquated notions against us; and therefore I think it necessary to reply to them here.

Well, with regard to the instinct alleged to be opposed to celibacy, I do not think that any individual has ever felt himself bound in conscience to follow it. Surely the common sense of the world has never believed that the gates of heaven should be closed against all those who do not choose to marry. If then celibacy, when practised in the world, be considered no violation of natural laws or instincts, why should it be condemned as such in the Church, where it is practised, not for selfish or worldly reasons, but to obey a divine call, to follow the aspirations of the soul to the most perfect form of life, and to make the most entire sacrifice of oneself, in imitation and in recognition of God’s own most perfect sacrifice for us on the Cross. The Catholic Church has the teaching of her divine Master impressed on her mind with a never-fading freshness; and by the illuminating grace of the Holy Spirit within her, she knows the full significance of the words: “In the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.” (Matt. xxii. 30.) This revealed glimpse of angelic life shows her that the state of virginity is the higher and more perfect state; and hence, without forcing any one into it, but rather in guarding its entrance with severe and crucial conditions, she has never ceased to proclaim to the world its priceless blessings in this life, and its special reward in eternity. St. John tells us what this latter is; and his words, carefully considered, ought to be sufficient to bring home the conviction to every candid mind, that the practice of celibacy is divinely sanctioned. “And I beheld: and lo a Lamb stood upon Mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty-four thousand having his name and the name of his Father written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of great thunder: and the voice which I heard, was as the voice of harpers, harping on their harps. And they sung as it were a new canticle, before the throne, and before the four living creatures, and the ancients; and no man could say the canticle, but those hundred forty-four thousand, who were purchased from the earth. These are they who were not defiled with women: for they are virgins. These follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were purchased from among men, the first-fruits to God and to the Lamb.” (Apoc. xiv. 1-4.)

The instinct, then, that would lead men and women into the married state, although implanted in them by God, is not generally accompanied by any feeling of personal obligation that would make it sinful to oppose it. But even though it were, a distinct call from God to make to Him the sacrifice of family ties, and to live for Him on earth with an undivided heart would be not only a sufficient justification to us, but would also entail on us a manifest duty to do so. That this call is given to the ministers of the Gospel and to others seems to me clear from the words of our divine Lord in reply to St. Peter, asking Him: “Behold we have left all things, and have followed Thee: what therefore shall we have?” And Jesus said to them: “Amen I say to you, that you, who have followed Me, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on the seat of His majesty, you also shall sit on twelve seats judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for My name’s sake: shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall possess life everlasting.” (Matt. xix. 27-30.)

If these words do not clearly signify the divine approval of a life of celibacy for the sake of Christ, such as is practised in our Church, then it must be held that the words of our divine Lord were uttered without meaning, and calculated to lead those who heard them into serious error.

The reply I have already given answers equally the third of the objections already stated: namely, that celibacy is opposed to the divine command: “increase and multiply.” This command, if it be one, has never been taken to apply individually to each human being; but if it did, it would be superseded by a direct and unmistakable call from God, such as the Catholic Church requires and does her utmost to ascertain before admitting anyone to the sacerdotal or religious state.

The last objection charges celibacy with occasioning much immorality and scandal. I answer this charge by simply saying that it is not true. The history of our Church, now nearly nineteen centuries before the eyes of men, gives the clearest and highest testimony, from its first page to its last, to the unmixed good produced on society and the world by the ecclesiastical system that has celibacy for its most essential condition. Only men untrammeled by home-ties could have evangelized the nations of the earth, as the Apostles and their successors have done: only women without husband or family could band together in daily and nightly prayer for an erring world that they could not otherwise assist: only such as they could tend the sick and dying in our hospitals, could visit the poor and outcast in the slums and by-courts of our towns, could open orphanages for the abandoned young and Homes for the helpless old, and become mothers to the one while they supplied the place of daughters to the other. These and other equally important works of charity and mercy are being done in the Church daily from the first Pentecost down to the present,—they are being done gratuitously, by willing hands and devoted hearts, solely because those engaged in them have left all things to follow their divine Master.

I trust that these remarks will assist candid Protestant readers to remove from their minds those traditional notions about “Priests and Nuns,” which form one of the bulwarks of the creed they profess. But I intend them to serve another end: namely to counteract the injurious effect of un-Catholic reading on our own people. The literature of our day is not Catholic; and yet we live in a reading age. The consequence is, that many of us have acquired the deplorable habit of reading indiscriminately every book and paper and magazine that comes in our way; and from the many foul misrepresentations made against us, a feeling of uneasiness gains gradually upon us, which it is most important to remove. Now there is no institution in the Catholic Church that is more misrepresented, and ridiculed, and hated, than this very practice of celibacy of which I have been speaking. We require, therefore, in the interests of our people to keep clear ideas before them concerning this practice, its object, its heroism, and the manifold blessings it has conferred on the world.

To sum up, then, in a few words the subject of this chapter: we have unmistakeable proofs of the divine institution of home; first, in the happiness with which God has left it invested, even after the fall of man; secondly, in the instinct that draws the heart to it, whatever be its condition or surroundings; and thirdly, from the revelation of its object made by the Creator Himself, in the foundation of the first home. This object is twofold. It regards, first of all, the husband and wife, who by their mutual society help each other, in the attainment of the common end of their creation. It regards secondly the children, whom God may commit to them, for whose material well-being and development they are bound to consult, but whose spiritual growth is to be their paramount and unremitting care.